television

“No, I know. It sounds weird to me too,” I assured the mother of my son’s friends. “I did just ask if your kids could come over and I could show them Japanese cartoons and take pictures of them. I get it.”

Let’s rewind back to mid-December: my son and I were Christmas shopping, and Nintendo had a game kiosk set up in the mall. Among the games was one called Yo-Kai Watch. My son and I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to it, except that one of the game’s characters was a butt. Like, literally, a butt. A Nintendo rep asked my son if he wanted a Yo-Kai Watch mask. “THE BUTT I WANT THE BUTT,” my son yelped because he’s seven years old and he’s my son and I love him as much as anything could love anything.

The 25th anniversary of The Simpsons was this week! The half-hour sitcom began airing way back on December 17, 1989!

If you were raised on the humor of The Simpsons, as I was, you might have a bevvy of insults and comebacks culled straight from the show. For a hot-90s-minute, I was requesting that people “don’t have a cow, man” or for people to “eat my shorts”. Everything was totally coming up Milhouse whenever I dropped a Simpsons joke.

But that didn’t mean that younger-me understood every episode. The Simpsons really wasn’t a kid’s show, but we all somehow watched it. As a child, I had a limited frame of reference for all of the humor – and while this made the show appeal to both younger and older generations, it also made the show great to re-watch now that I’m an adult. Some of those jokes I missed as a kid really hit the mark now.

That being said, there are definitely episodes that your kids can’t even. Can’t even what? Understand? Handle? Come up Milhouse? Check out our list and suggest your own at the end!

Our Philips LCD TV was only eight years young and its warmth would light up a room. It gave us incredible memories – like the time that one show was on. Or that other time when that other show was on. And probably reality television. And video games. All of the video games.

Philip the TV had more life to give. But that life was cut short Saturday night, murdered. And the murderer was my son.

This weekend I was working on a stroller review comparing our old UppaBaby Vista with our new Baby Jogger City Select. Searching for a few images to use in the post I came across a blog post about a homemade iPad mount for their kid a Mom made for her City Select. After reading the post I was, as a parent, well, not horrified but definitely annoyed. I understand that we all have that point at which we will do anything to shut up comfort our kids when they hit a high enough decibel or enough time elapses with the crying/screaming. Sure, No problem, I get it. But I think it’s a completely different story to preempt that potential situation by giving them something in the hopes of keeping them quiet.

To the author, Mrs. Graham’s credit she does point out that she knows that people are not going to be happy with her letting her 2 year old kid watch TV and invites “HAVE AT IT haters”. Well, this hater is gonna hate I guess.

The Olympics have been on for a week now (really, only a week!), and even with all the hub-bub over tape delays, people are glued to their televisions at all hours to see the world compete in everything from archery to wrestling (there was no sport starting with a z, boo hoo). It got us wondering, as we always do elsewhere, how the Olympics would honor dads.

After all, there have got to be a whole lot of Olympians that were coached by fathers, carpooled to their practices by fathers, or at least bought equipment by fathers…right? So, that should translate into viewership and consumers – meaning dads watching the Olympics with their little hopefuls, watching all of the ads, saying “son and/or daughter – tomorrow, we’ll buy one of those products in the commercial.”

Well, we watched, and watched, and then watched some more. At times, we were watching two events picture-in-picture on television, while streaming another on our phone and another on our computer (and another on our laptop)! We sucked up almost everything the Olympics put out there, except for the really long bathroom break we took during equestrian jumping.

We found: the Olympics have definitely been sold to mom this time around, but dad hasn’t been completely forgotten. Really, there’s been one big offender that’s forgotten dads, but we saw it coming and expected it. We’ll explain.

Samrick tells us why this is important: “According to a recent report in The New York Times, one of the strongest reasons women aren’t getting married today is because they don’t think men are as reliable as they used to be. The messages these women get day in and day out make this a sad, but understandable, reality in their minds.”